Okay.  I’m a couple of days later in changing my calendar page from June to July, so I guess I’ll do so now.

Hey.  July 4 is tomorrow.  Independence Day!   Great!

Hm.  I wonder if August’s photograph will be the one that went around the Internet last election season.  Flag based, focused on the season.

(Photograph from the 2009 Sarah Palin calendar taken from Andrew Sullivan, who I think cited it from somewhere else.  And, yes, it is nauseating.  But no worse than the 2009 “Joseph Biden Calendar”, I suppose.)

This is Garfield’s congregation.  Which puts into perspective Garfield’s diary excerpt the week before calling a sermon “a very stupid sermon on a very great subject”.

He who studies the movement of American society cannot fail to see that we are under a reign of selfishness in striking contrast to 40 years ago.  As one newspaper said this morning, office-seeking, office-hunting, and looking after spoils have become the main object of life.  Each man is trying his best to crowd the others out.  We are having disgraceful political fights, and we may expect to see these scenes intensified.  Money, money is the craze all over the land; get money, no matter how, is the popular cry.  Why?  Because pleasure is the chief end of man.  Such is the tone of American society today, and it grieves me to say it.  Its apostles are lionized.  The men who are stabbing American morals and constitutional government to the vitals are held up as emamples to follow and admire.  I say to you that the President’s assassination is directly chargeable to this philosophy of good living that is pervading the minds of the public today, and assassinations will be multiplied unless we call a halt.  I predict that in less than 25 years, if matters go as they are going, we will have the Roman Arena in this country, and I do not think it improbable that gladiatorial combat will be restored.

– Rev. M. Harbison, visiting for Rev Power, Church of Disciples

……………..

Our much boasted universal suffrage, our power and our shield, as in our enthusiasm we are want to term it, is not without its drawbacks, not without its dangers to our Nation.  I believe in popular suffrage to the full; but in the name of intelligence and virtue and common honesty, not say decency, I am against the system that places unrestricted power in the hands of the paupers and criminals whom Europe is pouring upon our shores by tens of thousands.
– Reverend Dr. JP Newman

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Philadelphia Press
We have not yet become so Mexicanized that assassination is employed as a political weapon.  This crime, which plunges a whole Nation into sorrow, is the deed of one maddened fanatic, crzed it may be, by political excitement and wrought into a morbid state by imaginary wrongs, but representing nothing but his own insanity.
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Pastors through, some more news items.
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Washington Star
Laying aside its effects upon the incumbent of that high place and those immediately connected with him, and without attaching much importance to the character or purpose of the murderer, the fat that two Presidents have fallen by the bullet of an assassin, raises the question whether the simple surroundings and quiet modes of life heretofor adopted by our Presidents are consistent with the genious of our institutions and becoming to the head of a Republican form of government are, after all, wise and sufficiently safe.  If the Chief Executive of the Nation is to be a target for the bullet of lunatics, disappointed aspirants for office, or political malcontents, it will be necessary to surround the office and its incumbent by more formal and efficient means of protection than have yet been devised or thought necessary.
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And you got to love the British Tories!

London Standard
It would almost seem as if a wave of revolutionary ruffianism is passing over the world.  We are not alone in suffering from its violence.  It is not England only, nor yet only Russia, only Germany, only Italy, that feels the shock.  The American Republic itself has just experienced its malevolence in a peculiarly painful manner.  It matters not whether the assassin of President Garfield had or had not associates in his hateful enterprise.  His act was revolutionary, was ruffianly, and was stamped with that vicious character of personal vengeance which marks all the attempts of the party of disorder.  They do not even aim at a rough sort of justice.  All they seek to do is to kill somebody or other, to alarm a great number of persons, and to disconnect society.  They seek to establish a reign of terror by spasmodic explosions, by irregularly recurring strokes of the dagger, by all and every of the fitful expedients of vague and general vengeance.  The American people are much too shrewd to be the dupes of the blatant adventurers who seek to raise a skirmishing fund to put an end to the tyranny of Great Britain.  They know thoroughly well that if England is suffering from any disease or any cause whatever, it is not from too little liberty, but from too much; not from the cankor of tyrnny, but from the enfeeblement of that just authority and those legitimate restraints, without the cooperation of which society never yet was held together.  Knowing this, and reflecting upon it, they will hardly refrain from drawing the conclusion that what is our case today may be theirs tomorrow.

Apparently stung by the net effect of sparodic blogs reporting, in combination of mock and irritation, meetings with Larouche card-table deployments, LPAC has stuck this report — a distillation of some scattered comments into something of a rallying call.  It is… funny, in that moribud way all of these things tend to be funny.

Generation that Fought the Nazis: LaRouche Is Right on Obama!
July 1, 2009 (LPAC)—Lyndon LaRouche’s webcast call to arms on fighting Barack Obama’s Nazi policy on medical treatment, profoundly touched the souls of his generation—those who fought in World War II, or lived through it. But many boomers and younger people were protective of Obamamania, and fearful of what their “friends” and peers will think about calling Obama’s plan “Nazi.”
Among the older people, whether it was those who attended the Washington-area meeting where LaRouche spoke, the regional meetings, or watched it on the web, or learned about it in the field, there was a powerful response. At a literature table in the New Jersey region, an older woman was at our literature table, getting briefed on the LPAC fight, and looking at our signs on Obama and Hitler. She looked over the LPAC literature, and exclaimed, “You’re right, his policy is Nazi.” Then she pulled up her shirtsleeve to reveal the numbers tattooed on her arm, put there when she was a prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp in Poland at the age of 9.
At the Washington, DC-area event, an Italian-American man from Philadelphia, said, “Lyn has to win. I know, I lived under Mussolini. Lyn is right.” Two men in their 80s had the same response. One, at a field site in Los Angeles said, referring to Obama and the Administration, “I’m 80 years old. They’re out to kill me!” Another World War II veteran, attending the New Jersey office showing of the webcast, said, “I’m in trouble … I’m over 80 … they want to be rid of people like me.” In Chicago, a 79-year-old man, who had retreated into religion from politics, listened by phone to Lyn’s webcast, and later said, “That speech should be on the front page of every newspaper in the country! What he said about the British is absolutely true! In fact, everything he said is true! He’s the smartest man in the world!!”

Hm.  Frankly, they could play the “Current events remind person alive during WW2 of Nazi Germany” game since at least Nixon, probably before.  A note to the family of the elderly persons referenced in this item:  it may be time to take over some of their financial decisions.

Granted, if one cares one probably has read these things, but I draw your attention to the factnet posts of  Hylozoic Hedgehog  under the “Old Mole Files” and the “New Mole Files”.  The “Old Mole Files” plows through the weeds regarding something I have no real idea, and the Larouche takeover of the “CODE” publication, as well placing various actors onto the scene.  “The New Mole Files”:  I have a confession to make here.  I am actually a little underwhelmed by it.  Perhaps this effect will change when I read (after a few posts pile up)  posts regarding “Mop Up”, but my basic reaction is “Tell me something I don’t know.”  Which shouldn’t be my reaction (he’s told me something I didn’t know with the “Old Mole Files”, after all), except I gather part of the purpose here is carrying on an argument against  Dennis King (”quit lying” about “Larouche’s ideological orientation”), such as I’m left with the belief that it promised more than it delivered on that score.

I assume this was the purpose of putting in bold type and adding a paranthetical “emphasis added” to the phrase in Larouche’s stated purpose of finding “Leninist Boomers”.  Of course, a secondary purpose is to put the context of the org as being a forty year history of yanking a small cadre of “Leninist Boomers” around in various fashions, which I guess would argue for the cult orientation over any ideological consideration.

To review how the “left” and “right” strait-jacket is reconciled, here are two quotations from Tim Wohlforth in his memoir The Prophet’s Children:

“In fact it is quite remarkable how the ‘new’ Larouche organizes his followers in a Leninist cadre fashion, drives them with a vision of the historic tasks and the necessity of their actions and successfully reaches layers of society with “transitionl” slogans that appeal to economic needs or old prejudices.”

“The Larouchites began mouthing anti-Semitic phraseology, promoting the nuclear program and arms industry, advocating a Star Wars defense, and baiting gay people.  The old Trotskyite, a member of my own small organization, had emerged as a Fascist!”

I hesitate to say Wohlforth over-stepped his bounds in referring to various mainstream causes of the 1980s into the realm of “fascist”, though the “gay baiting” in particular may have the “matters of degree” on a one dimensional “left / right” spectrum.  The “anti-semitic phraseology” is what remains constant.  Also I wonder what “layers of society” he refers to here — surely the elderly people in the LPAC release and the similar credit fraud victims of the 1980s, and the college aged recruits, and a larger number I guess anyone who’s quoted a single line from Leon Strauss in the past eight years and talked and blamed Hitler on Prescott Bush over the past two decades.

I also go to the response to the Wall Street journal editorial of 1986 chaffing at the reference to “right wing”, with the comment that they’re ignoring that their conspiracy theories stem from a right-wing history.  For the most part — immediately past the issue front which can lean either conservative or liberal — the grand conspiratorialing is at home and is undistinguishable from something available for sale in the back-page of a John Birch Society catalouge.  (Or, further afield, Liberty Lobby’s Spotlight.  And some perenials commence.)  But not entirely?  The one about Western Imperialists’s grab of Africa’s raw materials, subjecting them to third world conditions — a mainstay of the org, put into words at the end of the SNL sketch, serves as an in to various despots  — strikes me as Leftist.  Does it become “Rightist” by mere dent of sticking a Jewish financier and cabal behind it?  (Well, that’s my crudest brush off of Chip Berlet’s “Right Woos Left” piece.)

Here is a fairly typical piece –   A liberal case against Wal Mart –  select paragaphs would not be out of place in an issue of, say for instance — In These Times, but the other paragraphs feature the Larouchian calling card.  A conspiracy brought to you by Synarchists in league with the Imperial Rome model.  It’s the mode of operation adaptable to practically any popular political cause of the past 30 years.  In the case of the Wal-Mart piece, I don’t know if it’s to lure a recruit from a general liberal arena, have the wind at the back of a Larouchie as s/he holds forth on a street corner, or to make it roll onto a like-minded website or two.

Another quotation from Wohlforth brings something to mind on what I regard as the nature of the cult.  I can’t find it immediately — it’s somewhere in this book.  Something to do with “we may never know what turned Larouche against the Left”.  I found it a misguided quotation.
Trotskyites are famous for their intercessine fights and references to every other Trotskyite organization as “Reactionary Deviants”.  Indeed, it’s the only thing they’re famous for.  To look through the Spartacist publications from the 1960s into the 1980s (and it’s been over a year since I’ve done so) was to provide me the one essential context for the org.  The image which comes to mind was a photograph of Tim Wohlforth protesting The War with the sign “Troops Home Now”, and the accompanying admonishment that the Wohlforthites “adopted a purely Nationalist line” whereas the Spartacists proudly fought on behalf of the Viet-Cong.  The other image is a cover of a grubby and dirty mine striker, iconic image I’m pretty sure, and I don’t know my history of the Second or Third International well enough to locate it to Poland or the Ukraine.  Surely the Spartacists hawking these publications on a street corner held much in common with the rough and tumble striker
So Larouche left that venue — imaginary though it may be, called forth the “Fifth International” where he has played that game of historical mission on a larger scale.  Wohlforth is gone; Newton is in!  (Though, oddly enough, Mark Rudd remains in.)  Revolutionary Workers strikes are gone; Benajamin Franklin’s “youth movement” is in!  Such was where the “Leninist Boomers” were yanked about.  [Incidentally, I believe the Fifth International has failed and been utterly corrupted, and will thus be forming the Sixth International.]

As for the Nazis?  Well, we can move further afield from King, who  — cavalier about posting a photograph of the man’s arms out-stretched though he may be (ironically transforming Larouche into an ordinary politician) in his defense titled his book “The New American Fascism”, not “New American Nazism”.  I have no opinion on Plato and his “Golden Souls”, except that Plato’s Republic has served as the rationalization for a number of despots.  I have no opinion on Nazi Space swirls, except to point to Von Braunn’s courtship.  And I’m hard pressed to figure out what else the org’s effect, outside its orbit of spending membership’s lives [Jeremiah Duggan the extreme example], has been besides stirring this conspiratorial items into public discourse.
Across the spectrum.  On the far edge you have European’s “researchers” and “reporters” who insist to him that they know they all read Mein Kampf and sit before portraits of Hitler.  An edge inward and you have this admitted tin-foil hat wearer’s conspiracy theory that the org was financed by fleeing Nazis’ Gold and there we have Dave Emory’s program which sticks him in as part of that “Underground Reich” (though, Emory would also hold forth about Prescott Bush on that score.)

Bear with me.  There will be at least two more posts of this type.  Relating to the news coverage and debate surrounding the assassination of James Garfield, from July of 1881… on a couple months.  Why?  It seems to provide provides some tangeantal historical context for current debate surrounding political violence, and the problems of where to place blame and what to fault.  The debate seems to reverberate and rhyme.

Next post for this mini-series, when I get around to it.: a couple of preachers.  Fall of Rome and all that, unless we change our wicked ways.
New York Tribune
A second president lies stricken down by assassination.  President Lincoln was murdered, not by rebellion, but by the spirit which gave the rebellion its force.  President Garfield has been shot down, not by a political faction, but by the spirit which a political faction has begotten and used.  But for that spirit, there was hardly a man in this country who seemed at sunrise more safe from murderous assault. [...]
“Was he crazed by political excitement?,” then, as many say?  At what point, if ever, did the madness of faction become the madness of irresponsibility?  Do the leaders of factions ever intend all the mischief which grows from the wild and desperate spirit which they create, feed, and stimulate week after week?  Is it not their constant crime against self-government that, by kindling such a spirit, they send weak or reckless men beyond the bounds of right or reason? [...]
As a “Stalwart of Stalwarts” his passion was intense enough to do the thing other reckless men had wished were done.  So the assassin Booth put into a bloody deed the malignant spite of thousands of beaten rebels.  His deed stands in history as the cap-sheaf of the rebellion.  So the spirit of faction which fired the shots of yesterday gave in that act the most complete revelation of its real character.
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Richmond Dispatch
Well is it for the man who sped the bullet of the assassination that he did not do it in a Southern city; for hot Southern blood would have terminated his life without waiting to learn whether he was a maniac or not — as he was, we take it for granted.
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Louisville Courier Journal
It is fortunate that the hand which dealt that blow was not that of a Southern man, because if it had been we should have from one end of the land to the other a Stalwart outcry against the South.  The author of this dire crime claims to be a Stalwart, and what is there in the character of the man in whose name and interest the deed was done and whose desperate fortunes it saves from destruction to rescue them from a suspicion which would, by a change in that author’s nativitiy, firmly attach itself to the most innocent people?  Mrs. Surratt was hanged on less circumstantial evidence than occurs to the mind as to Roscoe Conkling and Chester A Arthur.  The vile nature of the contest at Albany, the despicable rancor of the combatants, and the base methods adopted by both parties, render murder as likely a weapon as any other; and while we should be slow to accuse anybody, and prayerful that the man Guiteau is not the instrument of a conspiracy, we should not be eager to assume the innocence of a body of political wretches whose hands are stained by every other crime — not preciptate in wishing to hurry into power a hand of bandits and plunderers who may have planned this assassinatino as their last resort.

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Atlanta Constitution
The news is unquestionably startling, but no thoughtful man will deny that it is the natural and appropriate outcome of the political insanity which goes by the name of Republicanism.  Frenzy and fanaticism are the streams which have fed this remarkable organization from the first.  The fury with which the Southern people have been pursued, the stupendous fraud of 1876, the acknowledged corruption of 1880, the tremendous struggle between the factions, and the marvelous greed for office, all go to show the life of an individual, even though the individual be the Republican President of the United States, will not be allowed to stand in the way of those who are seeking place and power.  There are thousands of Republicans in the North today as insane as the “Stalwart of the Stalwarts” who shote the President, and as ready to be made tools of.  There are thousands of Republicans who would welcome a period of anarchy that would place in control of affairs the restless and revolutionary spirits who are determined at all hazards to control the Government.

It’s always interesting to see how the parties position their fund raising pitches, tending toward an unrealistic Villiany.  Try this story for instance.

The Democratic Governors Association sent a fundraising e-mail to supporters Tuesday highlighting Minnesota, Alaska, Florida and Georgia as “top pickup prospects.”  [...]

He also invoked DFLers’ biggest opponents — Rep. Michele Bachmann and former Sen. Norm Coleman — in his pitch.

“Bachmann, you may remember, called for an ‘armed and dangerous’ revolution against President Obama’s policies,” Glendening wrote. “And when Norm Coleman lost his 2008 Senate race, he wasted millions of dollars on legal maneuvers designed to keep Al Franken from being seated.

“Can you imagine what Bachmann or Coleman would do if they took control of Minnesota and its eight congressional districts?”

A bit hard to fathom.  I am willing to bet neither will be running for Governor, or if one or the other does (particularly Bachman — though Coleman would be exempt from my bet if he had lost the election a bit more cleanly), the Republican Party of Minnesota and nationally would be unofficially backing somebody else for nomination.  And that’s not just because of the sentiment expressed with:

Although the names of both Bachmann and Coleman have been bruited about as potential candidates, both have demurred about the possibility.

So why bring the dire warnings of a Bachman or Coleman Governorship into a fundraising pitch?  Was George W Bush pre-occupied?

Rush Limbaugh explained Mark Sanford’s affair as an opt out of the Obama’s Destuctive System of Governance.

Michael Savage furthered along to the grand Obama Political Destruction Conspiracy:  “We’re also going to talk about the hit job on Gov. Sanford. Yes he committed adultery by admission, but you have to ask yourself a few questions. How did his local paper get his private emails, number one? Number two, they say they have known about this since December, but they held off releasing this information until now. So you have to ask yourself, why did the press just now get around to exposing the scandal of Gov. Sanford?”

Of the two, I’m guessing there is more to the Savage conspiracy than the Limbaugh theory.  Consider the history, and consider this bit of hypothesis.

Obama’s political career began with a special election in the Illinois Senate which opened up when US Congressman Melvin Reynolds was indicted and runned out of office — as the Illinois State Seantor Alice Palmer jumped up to run for the Congressional seat.  Famously, after Palmer lost, and after she assembled the requisite number of petitions to get on the ballot, Obama aggressively challenged Palmer’s name of the ballot.
Melvin Reynolds was indicted for  sexual assault and criminal sexual abuse for engaging in a sexual relationship with a 16-year-old campaign volunteer.  Perhaps Obama noticed this opening of sex-related scandals, as his next career rise was certainly aided and abetted by sex scandals.

The early Democratic front runner for the US Senate seat in 2004 was Blair Hull.  Then… A month before the primary elections a news story broke regarding his divorce from his ex-wife. The controversy ended up destroying the Hull campaign.  Hull tried to keep the divorce records sealed, but pressure from journalists and his opposing candidates forced him to release them.  And so Obama was nominated.
The Republican nominee was Jack Ryan.  Some of his divorce records had been opened up to the public; others not.  Then…

On June 22, 2004, after receiving the report from the court-appointed referee, the judge released the files that were deemed consistent with the interests of Ryan’s young child. In those files, Jeri Ryan alleged that Jack Ryan had taken her to sex clubs in several cities, intending for them to have sex in public. [...]  Jim Oberweis, Ryan’s defeated GOP opponent, commented that “these are allegations made in a divorce hearing, and we all know people tend to say things that aren’t necessarily true in divorce proceedings when there is money involved and custody of children involved.

In short order, Ryan dropped out of the race.  Obama had no opponent on the ballot.  Then the Republicans selected Alan Keyes to fill the ballot, improving Obama’s electoral fortunes even more.

Obama gets elected president four years later.   Sure enough, within half a year, two of his possible opponents are destroyed by scandals involving extramarital affairs. One John Ensign starts to work on raising his profile, and as such gets touted as a Republican presidential possibility.  He ten has to admit to an extra-marital affair with a a female staff worker to avoid threats of blackmail.  One Mark Sanford emerges as a leading opponent of Obama in striking against his stimulus bill, and becomes a favorite of some conservatives for a presidential run.  But he disappears for five days and is caught in a web of lies involving hiking the Appalachia Trail, and thus is forced to confess to an extra-marital affair in Argentina.
Two down — ten more to go!

It might behoove me to mention that Obama won the Democratic nomination from something called “the Clinton Machine”, a towering contraption which had various  vulnerabilities to it that the media tended to gloss over in early explanations of Hillary Clinton’s “Inevitibility”.  The residuals of the Monica Lewinsky scandal were probably one permetation, though it’s hard to measure against the whole body of work.

I suppose, to connect the dots, to challenge Obama on his way to the Power is to expose your infedility skeletons in the closet.  The one man Obama could not vanquish was his Congressional opponent, Bobby Rush.  Maybe the media wasn’t on Obama’s take yet?  Or mabe Rush was good at hiding any extramarital affair from Obama’s Hunger-Lust hand?

For the life of me, I can’t tell from what perspective this is coming from.

But it does link the two current stories in the “Ron Paul Revolution” — the ACLU and “Campaign for Liberty” backed lawsuit against a TSA search of a cash-wielding Ron Paul supporter.

Go one further step to the rawstory link and you find this puzzling opening.

The American Civil Liberties Union may have just earned itself a few more Republican admirers.

That greatly disfigures Ron Paul’s relationship with the Republican Party, but so it shall be.

The other item of news.  Paul’s “Audit the Fed” has gotten its 218th (ergo majority in the house) sponsor.  This was pre-arranged, though for the life of me I don’t really understand the point of the symbolism.

I suppose there is some overlap in support.  Your alexjones and “from the wilderness“ type has settled on Kucinich as the Democrat to balance Ron Paul in exposing the Oligarchy, but that’s just because Cynthia McKinney is out of office.

Though it doesn’t take too much googling to find support for a Paul / Kucinich ticket and the inaccurate sentiment that they are the most ideologically compatible of a bunch.

Incidentally, not so fast on that bill.  The Senate has a way of reconfiguring things.

Third item of interest: dateline Connecticut:  Stuart Rothenberg is not impressed by Ron Paul accolyte candidate Peter Schiff.  But that’s not Peter Schiff’s point.  I guess.

Out of the Matt Taibbi - Goldman Sachs dust-up — a bit of it here,
he brings to the attention that Goldman Sachs is set to profit from the Cap and Trade bill.

Of course, Mr. Goldman Sachs would.  He’s very much plugged in to the trends, and can hedge his bets every which way in Congressional pieces of legislation.  So he’s moved forward based on that one, so intricately tied to the US Government that he is.

Not really a good argument either way regarding Cap and Trade, as against some Goldman Sachs bashing in – for instance — the Dennis Kucinich question at the time of the first bank bail-out “Is this the U.S. Congress or the Board of Directors at Goldman Sachs?”.

Actually, I am left wondering about the greasing of the wheels for support from Big Corn in advancing the great savior “Ethanol”, skewing and disfiguring the policy unnaturally.    I have read a small amount of literature decrying Ethanol, and a smaller amount defending it.  My guess is that this geo-politically convenient energe source had better match the defenders’, lest this make “Cap and Trade” ever more useless, and…

… Obama’s legacy turn out to be one of swatting flies.

Maybe it matters not so much.  It barely passed the House.  Anything is supposed to be apt to pass the House.  I have a difficult time seeing the headlines as “Legislative Victory”, seeing the future in the Senate.  Maybe a “Clean Coal” allowance can be greased through to keep Byrd on board.